Bluebeard's Legacy

We all have one. At least.

Here in Merrie Olde England, throw a rock, and you’re likely to hit some kind of landed aristocracy. As long as the dusty titles give the children access to Eton or Cambridge, we really don’t care about much else.

Except that we’re land rich and money poor, and we’re forbidden to sell either land or belongings for cash influx.

And none of the jewels. That’s the law. Oh, you just got inducted into the Order of the Whatsis, just like Dad, and Grand-Dad, and Great Grand-Dad, and Great Aunt Matila Battleaxe that We Don’t Like to Talk About But We All Secretly Kinda Admire Her? Yeah, dead for a long time, but you still need to get your own new Order Collar made, because that’s the deal the Crown made with the Jeweler’s Guild. Keeps them in business, you know.

Asinine.

So we all have that secret closet of outdated jewelry we can neither sell nor wear. Some limited pieces we can wear, lend, or re-work. The rest sit there. Every once in a while, one gets smuggled out of the country, and gets sold in the New World, where they don’t have Guild laws trapping gold and enamel in perfectly useless forms. And they don’t care about landed aristocracy and their first world problems, or when the Order of the Whatchamacallit was closed and the long-dead king that handed out writs like candy is long gone. Oh, yeah, and that country no longer exists.

That’s not the most embarrassing room, not by a long shot.

We have our fairy tales, just like you do. Usually, ours are still the bloodthirsty kind, where the kids aren’t always saved. Little Red Riding Hood was eaten up in the original, and we still don’t know what happened to the children of Hamelin.

But it takes a special kind of gentry to laugh at Bluebeard till you’re, well, blue in the face.

I got spanked twice for that one. The first from the nanny reading us the story, and the second from Mum when she got the report from the tutor. I still don’t know why, since we have three locked rooms in the manor.

Three.

Father, Twelfth Baronet of the Line, blah blah history blah blah vaunted line blah blah really Father, people are dying and you’re actually sitting here spoon feeding me this pap on a silver spoon? Do you think I care which matriarch planted the roses in the hedge maze? Which cousin did what to our great-uncle? Who was banned from the Royal Circle hundreds of years ago?

But, here we are. As if these stories can’t be recorded, or written down. Seems like what few maids we can still afford to pay a pittance to could use some delicious gossip.

Well, anyway, when I was confirmed as the official heir at the tender age of seven, Father extracted the Official Ring of House Keys to show me those rooms.

Oh, they’re embarrassing, all right.

You know how expensive eggs are these days? Well, imagine a room full of illegal eggs collected by various ancestors, bringing so many of our birds to the edge of extinction. Now imagine a room the size of a study hall, lined floor to ceiling with shelves and shelves of cabinets, and glass stands in all the spaces in between, filled with rare eggs.

Not one of them a pysanky egg, that’s certain.

There were even empty spots for rare birds that no one had managed to collect. All those birds are now extinct, but still, the cabinets await their specimens. Like it was owed to the Noble Masters of the Manor. Or their God-given duty to complete the set.

The second room were the trophies.

Because of course other ancestors had to go abroad, poking their noses where they had no business going, shooting everything that didn’t stand still long enough, and smuggling their contraband home. There was the elephant’s foot waste basket. Here was a narwhal horn; at the far end were snow leopard and tiger pelts. I saw the human displays in one corner, and Father was kind enough to get the metal bucket in place before I embarrassed myself. That was placed outside the door for the maids to clean, as he swiftly unlocked and locked the door again.

The third…

Let’s just say that I learned we had traitors in the family, and leave it at that.

Bluebeard was willing to kill his wife over finding the room where the previous wives were interred. I would have gladly gone down to the family crypt, smashed their marble vaults open, dragged their desiccated corpses into the light, broke the skeletons to bits, burned the remains to ash, and spread those ashes to the wind while jumping on the pyre’s coals.

And yet I’m twice-spanked for laughing at Bluebeard’s overreaction.

Dude, you went ballistic about a bleeding key and keyhole? How about three whole rooms, bleeding floor to ceiling?

Well, that’s all right then. Always the typical response from Father, whenever I’d confront him with these ethical dilemmas. He and I didn’t do it, but we have a legacy of extermination that we are obligated to preserve?

After a calming pot of tea, I thought about New Ideas.

Can’t sell the family jewels. Can’t sell the land. Some of the historic bits, I can’t even develop or build upon. The folly has to stay, the useless thing. Not even a good backdrop for a Shakespeare production, because some idiot ancestor used cracked sandstone instead of marble or granite. I mean, really? Can’t even picnic close to it, and the riding trails got moved in case of boulders losing their upright nature in favor of the horizontal pose.

What would really piss off all those Fathers of My Great and Vaunted Line?

I thought over a lovely cuppa of Darjeeling.

And, eventually, I smiled evilly.

I could wait for nature to take its due course, and fully develop my plans.

Dearest Father wasn’t in the ground a week before I implemented changes.

We had useless lawns all over the place. Groundskeeping was more than overjoyed when we installed those modular tiny homes, and moved in a herd of retirees and veterans caught in the economic crisis. Roses grace their front lawns, scions of the antique species from the maze garden. We also sell potted snips from the rare ones.

Dearest Mama kept her apartment, but that was all. My younger sister, fifteen years my junior and unmarried, was given a choice – get a job, or get married to someone who would put up with her disagreeable nature. Both wailed, but Baronet Thirteenth of the Line was too busy Making Changes to listen.

I sold some of the useless Order jewelry clandestinely overseas, and paid most of it to carpenters and other workers. Things that Cannot Be Thrown Away, What Would the Neighbors Think were put behind sturdy cabinets of oak and thick plastic. Solid railings were installed in the main rooms, to serve as barriers to curious fingers.

Certain Things We Should Not Have were repatriated.

Certain Other Things were tucked into a Museum Obscura, where they could be seen discreetly. Because I was done with my own family’s whitewashing.

I contacted some conservation groups, already well-funded by the Crown and other guilty-minded landed families with their own clandestine collections, and offered their genetics labs free rein to collect DNA samples to bring the birds back to life.

Another yard was turned into a tasteful multi-gravel parking lot.

And I opened up the manor as a museum. With myself as the curator and tour guide.

And those three rooms got bloody well opened, and all the dirty laundry got aired. No, displayed – under glass. With proper lighting. Things that had been moved on had reproductions in place, to underscore the ghastliness.

Mama had vapors, of course, but the money came pouring in.

I was ostracized by my peers, but, truth be told, I did not care.

What would they do, take away my ceremonial knighthood? Break my sword? I’ll strap it back on the wall as a testament to the backwards thinking.

If we were going to have scandals hiding behind the literal skeletons in our closets, then they were going to get dragged out, cleaned, put on display, and work to make money for the family. Be useful for a change.

One of my Eton mates shows up on occasion, and brings his little sister. Well, not so little, she’s only two or three years younger than we are. She thinks this is delightfully hysterical, and asked him to meet her brother’s mate to see it all first hand.

She is, of course, Unsuitable.

But there’s a black diamond ring in the family jewels that would make a splendid engagement ring for her, so…

Well, we’ll see. All in due time.